Cut To

I’d like to say I first noticed the long rectangle of yellow light. There I was, at the Whitney Museum, wandering around with a group of women poet friends, armed with our Moleskines and ink pens and our plan for after when we’d eat decadent food and drink something with bubbles, and suddenly I found myself standing in front of Edward Hopper’s 1961 painting, A Woman in the Sun.The woman is in the sun, yes, but the sun isn’t visible. We know it’s there from the long rectangle of yellow light; from the shadow cast of the woman’s legs; from the title itself. But of course, it wasn’t the sun I was interested in, or the wooden bedposts or the black pumps or the blue sky out the window; it wasn’t the colors or the cinematic composition; it wasn’t even the cigarette. All I could see were the woman’s pert, perfect nipples.Eighteen months before my trip to the museum, I’d had my breasts cut off. Technically, I’d undergone a nipple-sparing bilateral mastectomy that I opted for after receiving a stage 2 breast cancer diagnosis showing invasive ductal carcinoma in the left breast and lobular carcinoma in the right. In that same surgery, I elected for the immediate reconstruction known as DIEP-flap, an autologous reconstruction in which my lower belly was cut from hipbone to hipbone and the branches of its primary blood vessels were surgically removed, shaped, and attached to my chest to form new “breasts.” It was a ten-hour surgery, and I spent the night that followed in an ICU under a heated air blanket to ensure that the painstaking work of the microsurgeon—the very magician who’d sawed me in half—hadn’t failed, and then three more nights in inpatient care. Because it was the pre-vaccine pandemic, I was allowed only a single visitor during my stay, and then only for a few hours a day.Confession: a few months before, I’d been—like many of us—steeped in the malaise of the pandemic. The brief euphoria of apocalypse and delight in Zooming with friends around the world had morphed into dreadful walks to the river with the dog. I felt trapped and miserable, and in my misery, I came up with two wishes that will certainly, for the rest of my life, serve as evidence for the be-careful-what-you-wish-for adage. My wishes: I wanted to spend more time in Manhattan! And I wanted to lose ten pounds!Cut to: me in the very heart of Greenwich Village standing in a snaking line of six-foot-distanced patients waiting to have our temperatures taken to enter Mt. Sinai Hospital. And those ten pounds. What can I say about those ten pounds? Since puberty, I’d always been a bit much. I’m fairly certain that there were three decades when my boobs were my single most defining characteristic. Maybe people’d say curvy or voluptuous; maybe they’d hold their two hands in front of their chest to indicate the size of my breasts, but there they were: my breasts, my tits, my bazookas, my melons.For so long, they’d defined me: they’d been the butt of jokes starting in fourth grade when my last name “Hefner” didn’t help; they’d offered me sexual pleasure and sexual shame; they’d been bound up in three sports bras on the elliptical; shoved into blazers while teaching in hopes no one would “notice”; momentarily subdued, at least a little, when I went on a Weight Watcher’s kick in the early 2000s; they’d fed my daughters when I sat in Carroll Park, been the envy of some mothers because, my god, they produced SO much milk; my children were never hungry. And now, they would be gone.“Begun cold, very early, October 1,” Edward Hopper’s wife and model, Josephine Nivison Hopper, wrote in her diary regarding A Woman in the Sun. She was seventy-eight years old.Cut to: Me at forty-six. Walking to presurgery blood work on a surprisingly warm November day, I leave my coat at home. I dig out a too-small flannel, one that I never wear because of the way the fabric tugs at the buttons across my chest. I choose a route through Madison Square, push my chest out into the sunshine, and parade across that park. I want one last catcall, one last inappropriate comment flung my way, one more rude hallelujah. I want to be wanted for my body one last time.Because I’m someone who enjoys fantasizing about the lives of married, childless artists, I was deeply satisfied to read this information on the Whitney’s website. I imagined Edward and Josephine, very early on that October 1, sun pouring through the windows of their apartment on Washington Square, old coffee cans filled with water and paintbrushes, their steady love and desire for each other—and the work!—captured in the brushstrokes. I was, at first, so fully what the website calls the “enticed viewer.” That sun! After lovemaking! And before!!! “Hopper transformed her,” the website claims, “according to his own internal vision.” I liked that very much: a husband painter transcending time to recall his model wife as she once was, as he had met her, those strong calves, the hair not yet grey, and those lovely pert nipples—And yet.Last week, I drove to Long Island to visit Marnie, the medical tattoo artist of my areolae. It was my fourth session with her—all painless because I have almost no feeling in my “new” far smaller breasts—and if you stand maybe six feet away (or have failing eyesight!), you might “believe” that my “nipples” are “nipples.” That day, Marnie also began a series of micro-needling sessions on the twelve-inch scar that runs across my lower abdomen. The process, which uses thin needles to make tiny holes in the top layer of skin, is safe and minimally invasive. The small wounds cause the body to produce collagen and elastin, which heal the skin thus lessening the appearance of the scar. So if these treatments, at $500 a pop, are successful, and you stand even farther away—fifteen feet? twenty?—I may appear to be a woman who has intact nipples and does not look as if she’s been sawed in half.The success of the “sawing in half trick” rests almost entirely on the woman’s ability to fit into the smallest space possible. This is why magicians prefer women. Girls, we can assume, would be even better. Just a little over a hundred years ago, the British magician P. T. Selbit performed what’s considered the first public sawing illusion. Here Selbit locked his assistant in a closed wooden crate. She could not be seen, no smile or flailing legs. He sawed and sawed, and since he’d tied her hands and feet and neck with ropes, the audience was given the impression that she could not evade the blade.But I’ve wandered. Where was I? I was standing at the Whitney staring at the Hopper painting. I was reading about Edward and Josephine’s tumultuous marriage (Tragic figure of small woman, Jo adds to her October 1 note). I was being sawed in half by my brother in a field; we’d take the earnings to the candy counter. I was looking at the flowers beside my large pink cup with its bendy straw and hospital ice. I was getting boobs, getting looked at, getting bored, getting anxious, getting told by my Scorpio boyfriend I should “wear a bra” to bed so I wouldn’t “get saggy.”I was getting the biopsy. My plan that day, September 2020, my first day in Manhattan since March, was to get the biopsy and head to a café—gloriously alone!—I’d have a glass of cold white wine, maybe a steak frites. It would be outdoors of course because, at that point in the pandemic, everything was outdoors. I’d tuck my folded mask under my waterglass, watch the passersby, maybe write a poem or a postcard to a friend. But it was raining. I don’t think it should hurt this much, I said to the radiologist. Her assistant held my hand. And I cried, not out of fear—I didn’t yet know to be afraid—but out of complete and utter pain. After I got out of the gown and back into my clothes, the assistant slipped me the number for who she thought was the best breast cancer surgeon in New York City. Just in case. Outside, I cradled my umbrella in my elbow, texted my friend, Erryn, about the number slipped to me: This doesn’t seem good, I wrote. I’m sure you’re fine, she said. On the way home, I stopped for a Big Mac and scarfed it in the car.Josephine Hopper is listed first as an American model. Josephine Nivison Hopper. The first instance I can find of her serving as a model is a 1906 portrait by her teacher at the New York Art School, Robert Henri: The Art Student aka Miss Josephine Nivison. Here twenty-two-year-old Josephine clutches a fistful of paintbrushes, her artist’s smock falling from her shoulders. Her intense gaze is at her art teacher aka Master Robert Henri. The gaze of her later modeling work, when she sat for Edward, is directed out windows, a sort of blurry black star where a pupil might be. Standing in the Whitney, I hear two women beside me talking. “What’s wrong with her eyes?” the first asks. “Maybe he was just bad with faces.”LOL. My eyes are up here.Jo met Ed around the time of this portrait by her teacher, and then one other time across two decades, but it wasn’t until they were both in their forties that they entered what was a violent marriage in which Ed became the primary artist (a visionary!) and Jo (a lady flower painter . . .) his bookkeeper and only model. She mostly abandoned her own work, referring in her diaries to her paintings as “bastards” and “poor little stillborn infants.”Cut to: I was on the beach with my mother. It was the 1980s. I looked sixteen, the men said, but I was ten, so I ordered a Diet Coke. I was on the beach with my mother. It was the 1990s. We picked out bodies that looked like our bodies. That is sort of you but you have bigger boobs. I was on the beach with my mother. It was late September 2020. We’d braved air travel in our N-95 masks and flown south. The sun felt so good on my skin. The ocean. And then there was a notification on my phone. An update to my medical chart. It was supposed to say benign. I was supposed to take a deep exhale, say, phew, that was scary.In 1956, during the first live televised performance of a “sawing in half trick,” the Indian illusionist P. C. Sorcar terrorized audiences when he used a buzzsaw to cut his wife in two. Just after the saw had divided Mrs. Sorcar’s body, the host quickly signed off. The BBC was flooded with calls. Had viewers just witnessed a brutal murder?Cut to: I was with friends in an elevator at a fancy hotel in Austin. We were there writing and walking tens of miles in the city, which is not a walkable city, but there we were, four New Yorkers, walking under underpasses in search of a taco truck or somewhere that purportedly had good tequila. It was March, and having come out of a Brooklyn winter, we rolled up our sleeves and felt the sun on our bodies as we never had. We stripped down our layers. This was before Uber, before the term wifebeaters fell out of favor. So there we were in our wifebeaters walking through that blessedly warm city, each mile getting more and more sparkly. Had Dawn eaten the worm? Was there a worm?And then back to the hotel. Maybe to shower? To get the salt of sweat off, to sober up before the reading? We were laughing as we always laugh, fumbling with our keys, pressing the button to whatever floor we were staying on, and then, suddenly, a man on the elevator zoomed in on my breasts. Mine, he said. MINE. He reached across the elevator to my wifebeater breasts and grabbed them. What the fuck? Dawn said. Our floor arrived. We trailed out. Holy shit, Kristin said. Was that Andy Dick? Yes, yes, Stephanie confirmed, it was. And we padded our way down the long corridor of the hotel hallway.Staring into the drain of that hotel shower, my shoulders a bit burned and stinging from the water, did I have the tiniest bit of pride that a famous comedian had touched my breasts? That he had called them his? That my breasts were something a man—froml.a.: Land of Breasts!—might find compelling enough to reach across an elevator and grab? Are you okay in there? somebody yelled into the bathroom. And sure, I was fine.To be object. To be the object of desire. To be objectified. Why did it feel, in its own sick way, good? What did it grant me, and what did it take away? To have large breasts—large enough to be notable—was a sort of distinction, a strange privilege.Yesterday, coupling an interview about my new “breast cancer book” was a photo. The alt image text read: Windswept blonde woman smiling. The whole thing makes me a little nauseated. Formerly large breasted blonde with great access to health care gets through cancer smiling—and with a book! My adult life has reeked of privilege. I know this. I feel wildly lucky and deeply guilty, and to be very honest with you, when I first got my cancer diagnosis, I was a little relieved. I was like, finally, a little brutality to counteract this beam of sun that seems to have been shining on me since I turned eighteen or so.I knew, of course, that my breasts weren’t Andy Dick’s, but were they mine? In the weeks before my double mastectomy, I developed a nagging fear that once they cut off my breasts, I wouldn’t be able to write poems anymore. I texted Zoë: “What if that’s where I keep my poems?”But I hadn’t been keeping my poems in my breasts. They were gone, and the poems kept coming. I hadn’t kept them in my ovaries either, it seems, because several months later, on the advice of my oncologist, I had them removed as well. Cut to: a woman in her late forties with her breasts cut off and suddenly in the throes of menopause. Where’s Andy Dick now? Haha. Who wants to objectify me? What is mine?I think of my life so far in this body—of being sawed in half by my brother in a field; of carrying a little notebook and jotting poems between classes; of linking arms with my beautiful friends and laughing our way across cities; of riding in elevators and standing on beaches; of strolling across Madison Square Park or into the operating room; of even now, just sitting here, near this window, spring coming despite it all, a little heat on my shoulder from the sun—this experience of being in a body, being bodied, experiencing pleasure, encountering pain, squeezing into small spaces, being divided, being medicalized, being seen, or unseen, just being.Cut to: the magic after the cameras stop rolling. The real magic. Mrs. Sorcar emerges unscathed, whole. She fluffs the little feathers of her costume, and she is ready to do it all again, because she can, because she wants to.Yesterday, I returned to the Whitney for the new Hopper exhibit. It’s a solo show, save three small watercolors from Jo. I rode the big elevator up. Someone made eye contact with me; I smiled. I went to hate Hopper. I was supposed to hate Hopper. But I didn’t. Not as an artist, a maker; not even as a woman whose body has undergone massive change in the past two and a half years. I couldn’t. Had Edward done Jo a disservice by painting her “according to his own internal vision?” What right had he? What was hers? What is mine? Must we be beholden to whatever versions of our bodies—and our friend’s bodies, our spouses, our subjects—currently exist? Isn’t it all more expansive, more magical if we too let our own internal vision stand side by side with our reality?Standing in the light-filled museum, just blocks from the Washington Square apartment where Josephine Nivison Hopper died a little over fifty-five years ago, and looking at her bask in the glow of a warm rectangle of sun, I’m not sure she would object.